Chapter XXXVI
XXXVI
and there’s no way for a menial boot like Bagger to know the insides of a command dugout, these cellars of flickering mystery from which ferment the schemes to bend thousands of men forward or back, but in the angel’s light Bagger sees all, a fifteen-by-ten stupefaction of gimcrack luxury, walls of sandbag and hay bale and clay brick, a tracery of defunct electric lights, a field telephone box, a dip pen and inkwell and blotter, a stack of newspapers, shelves of books and manuals, an actual fucking bed on wire fucking springs, and a table beneath red-checked restaurant cloth holding the offerings General Pershing spurned, steaming bread, weeping cheese, and wine bottles, two of which hold candles, the rest holding the drinkable stuff,
and a hand-carved cuckoo clock tailed with weighted chains, probably nabbed from a German hutch, hangs where a taxidermied elk would flaunt its antlers in a hunting lodge, the pendulum going thuck with every arc, the secret heart, perhaps, that shuttles blood to its soldier capillaries, and for several seconds thuck is the only sound as Reis traces the angel’s halo with eyes starbursting in white light,
and Reis whispers, “What is she?” and Bagger, adrift in pride, says in a voice that cracks like a new father’s, “An angel, sir,”
and Reis studies, and frowns, and blinks, and asks, “Where did you find her?” and Bagger replies, “In the field, sir. Caught up in barbed wire. She fell from the…,” and he coughs, a throat of sand, desperate for that wine bottle, but he’s said enough, Reis’s eyes roll to the ceiling that’s less than a foot over his head, and to the heavens beyond,
and Reis’s good hand touches his heart, a gesture so unplanned Bagger finds himself stirred, though, on second glance, he sees Reis’s fingertips play along the medals pinned to his breast and loiter at the infamous space left for the Medal of Honor, and Bagger feels a tickle of unease, rather like Uncle Sam the shamefly,
and Reis whispers, “Minerva,” and Bagger hasn’t the faintest idea who Minerva is, but it can’t matter much, he didn’t know Effie Weffie or Naomi Veck or Arno’s old lady either, so Bagger chooses encouragement in hopes it greases the wheels, and nods, and says, “Minerva, that’s right, sir,”
and Reis stands taller, his hand pressed harder over his medal-fortified heart, and his eyes flick over Bagger’s shoulder, checking to confirm the gas curtain blocks any and all prying eyes, before returning to the angel, only the angel, Bagger all but forgotten, though the major general manages half a breathless question, “Does she… What can she…?”
and Bagger nods eagerly, this is what he wants, and gestures his head at the map table, and Reis’s reaction is to snatch up his golden walking stick and hasten backward to allow Bagger the space to set her down, something Bagger can’t believe, the commander of the U.S.
43rd, scuttling aside as if he, Lyon Reis, is the ignoble private to Cyril Bagger’s lofty superior,
and Bagger gentles the angel upon the map, all the wooden warriors of Europe smothered beneath her, and he takes a tailor’s beat to adjust her dress, cape, and hood, comb back her fine copper hair as if in preparation for a photograph,
and he pushes up her sleeves to demonstrate the extent of her skin’s radiance, which, doubled and tripled now, zeroes out the bunker’s pervading decay, corroded trench tools and soot-blasted gadgets reforged into instruments of deliverance as silvered as papal scepters,
and Bagger says, “She saved us, sir. Me and another private. Lifted us out of the path of a minnie, sir,” and he’s not sure Reis is listening, the major general circles the angel who follows his movement with an unreadable expression, so Bagger continues, more emphatically, “And Private Veck, sir. You remember. The Negro with the P3. He was going to hurt her and she made, and I know it sounds crazy, sir, but she made the dead stand up, and they stopped him,”
and Reis looms over her, a hand floating near her resplendent face, while his hidden hand, tucked into its coat-sleeve pouch, twitches in longing for the same, “Her helmet,” he sighs, an odd couple of words, “is as golden as it ever was,”
and because Reis seems so moved, Bagger feels that way, too, and raises his voice another notch, “And then there’s Private Arno, sir.
The kid. Well, the kid was killed, sir. Killed dead.
But the angel brought him back,” though Reis doesn’t seem to care, so Bagger inserts the name Reis used before, “Minerva, sir. Minerva brought the kid back to life,”
and this gets through to Reis, he looks at Bagger with pupils pinpricked by coursing rapids of light, he seems lost, but at the same time found, a drowning man taking hold of a sudden buoy, a miracle Bagger’s father never got to enjoy, and Reis swallows hard, he needs wine, too, and croaks, “Resurrection. Yes. We could all use a resurrection,”
and Reis breaks away as hard as a snapped rubber band, the heel of his walking stick snapping against floorboards, and when he wheels back around, he looks more like the Lyon Reis that Bagger knows, sharp and shrewd, and in a familiar tone he asks, “She is capable of the impossible, is that so?,”
and Bagger distrusts the question but can only respond with a nod, and Reis draws an inhale through his nostrils for what must be fifteen seconds, face pink, ears purple, left hand curling into a fist, and he says with trembling resolve, “Then the impossible is what I shall request,”
and before Bagger can warn off this request, explain what happened when Veck made an equivalent demand, Reis hurls his coat to the ground, revealing the polished and holstered Colt .
45 implicit to officers, as well as the sleeve tailored to snug his withered arm, a jolt to Bagger, it resembles a flaccid cock in prophylactic rubber, and then, accelerating the shocks, Reis grips the left shoulder of his blouse and rips it downward, a moist tear, and there’s his concave chest, his baby-fat tummy,
and one more tug and Reis’s right arm flops free, nothing like the ham-hock stumps amputees tote back home, this arm resembles a thick noodle, milk white from lack of sun, glossy as wet clay, dimpled at a neonatal elbow and ending in a flipper with one-inch vestigial fingers, far less terrible than the mutations imagined by Butcher Bird busybodies, but far more terrible, too, for Bagger need only glance at it to know it’s the parasite that has fed off Lyon Reis his entire life,
and the revealed arm reveals Reis, ego stripped as bare as his torso, every button and fold and cuff and trinket rendered irrelevant, he’s the spindly, off-center, poorly assembled human male General Pershing knew him to be, and his hungry left hand claws at the air, wanting, needing,
and Reis orders, or urges, or pleads, or sobs, “Give me my arm. Give me the arm God took from me. How hard I’ve worked for those who only see me as incomplete.
If my career must end here, give me the arm with which I might forge a new one.
That might make a woman look upon me with something other than dread.
If you really are Minerva, bring to me that which I deserve,”
and shit, fuck, the major general’s weeping, nothing could make Bagger squirmier, back when the 2nd Battalion was repelled at Cuisy by mustard gas, Bagger couldn’t even look at the soldiers who cried carbolic tears, and even forced himself to laugh at how they jumped into his latrine ditch to splash sewage into their burning eyes,
and that’s Reis now, chest hitching like a well bucket on a rope, skin ruddy except the right arm, the accursed right arm, still custard white, still flexing happily like a dreaming puppy, and when nothing happens, Reis’s face takes a magenta plunge and his lips curl into his mouth, over his teeth, inchworming toward self-ingestion, and Bagger thinks Reis might tear the arm off himself, a club with which to thrash the angel,
and so Bagger looks at the angel and whispers, “Please,” and hears Reis gag through spitty slobberings of tears, and Bagger hisses, “Please, do what he says,” and Reis’s coughs sawblade through his humiliation, while the angel’s eyes go from Reis to Bagger, she’s the map now, and her shifting geography asks Bagger if this is really what he wants, and he nods, this time it’s her own skin the angel needs to save,
and the angel closes her eyes,
and every lantern in the dugout curtsies for half a second, and the angel’s white light pulses, silent, incandescent, and too much for human eyes, Bagger peels away, covering his face, and from across the table comes the gamy reek of slaughter or birth, and a wet sound, almost flatulent, like venison mashed through a grinder, noises quickly overtaken by Reis’s shriek, he’s the shrieker at last,
and in the maelstrom of wincing and yawning flame, Bagger sees a thing he wishes he could scrub from his eyeballs, Reis’s doughy little arm flayed open as if by scalpels, the eggy epidermis, the yellow pudding of fat, the chocolate red of toneless muscle, the skin undulating like a bedsheet over cockroaches,
and then the muscles unthread as if guided by invisible fishhooks, the underdeveloped radius and ulna unsheathed like two bamboo stalks, at which point the unstrapped muscles ripple like ribbons while the tiny hand swells until it explodes, an orderly explosion, each scroll of skin, cartilage, and tissue arrayed like tools in a toolbox,
and Bagger gags, how in heaven could any miracle be so repellent,
and with the arm unraveled, sectioned, anatomized, and exsanguinated, a biologic basket-weaving begins, knots of tissue slugging down from Reis’s shoulder like snake-swallowed mice, a journey that, per Reis’s moan, is unspeakably painful, before the bone, larger now and stinking of sweet marrow, is enveloped by nets of nerve, knits of muscle, needlepoints of skin, all of which start pink and finespun but thicken and darken until the skin fuses smooth like melted rubber and arm hairs blade upward, a garden at breakneck growth,
and the angel, simple as that, opens her eyes,